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For me, a strength of Opulence is also a point for which it received criticism: there is no explanation of where the money comes from, of how the country gets its riches. The film noirs were about the bad things that people would do for cash, but Opulence imagines a world where there is endle…

[...] Perhaps Friend's most lastingly memorable piece was At the Drive-In (1959), a documentary recording of a screening of Rebel Without A Cause at a drive-in theatre in California. After some shots of cars arriving and young couples buying popcorn, the camera finds a spot and doesn't move. Un…

Dijonnaise's title has no obvious connection to the subject matter, unless we see it as a clue to what is in the man's bowl. The cut-and-shut combination of the words Dijon mustard and mayonnaise was actually a Friend invention, and he sold the name to Heinz in 1951 for an amount far greater …

[...] He picked on L. She blushed. She was usually quiet in class. But after some prompting she went on to talk more than I'd ever heard her talk before. Her voice was scratchy and thin, and her sentences would periodically drift into uncertain noises, rather than come to a deliberate end. But her …

There is a sequence in E.G. Hoch's Mensch Versus Mittwoch in which Eli, played with brilliant care by Emil Jannings, leaves a bar and walks drunkenly down a Berlin alleyway. He is set upon by an unseen assailant, who beats him to a bloody mess. The attack is shown reflected in the eye of a cat, who…